Telepan Local

329 Greenwich St. (212-966-9255)

An arancino is an arancino is an arancino. Even when it’s filled with bone marrow and it sits in a puddle of Parmigiano aioli. Just as a deep-fried rice ball will always taste like oil and starch, a shrimp popper doesn’t taste all that different from its battered-jalapeño brethren. And seven dollars for three pigs in a blanket? This isn’t Costco, but you wouldn’t necessarily guess that in a blind taste test. It’s hard to know how much ironic distance was intended from TGI Fridays when Bill Telepan, the Upper West Side’s undisputed king of the greenmarket, put together the menu for his downtown venture, Telepan Local, but you might wish there’d been more.

Not that there’s anything wrong with fried food. Once past the bar snacks, some of the best things on the menu are fried, like the delicious watercress salad—familiar to legion SriPraPhai fans, and prepared here with cashews, plenty of chili oil, and abundant disregard for any vestigial health benefits the leafiest of greens might possess. “Telepan unplugged” could be the slogan at this self-consciously casual venue, where the waiters wear Steven Alan plaid, trucker hats bob in the open-ish kitchen, and Goldman bankers from the office nearby, standing in black power suits three-deep at the Carrara-marble bar, order up all of the sourdough “pizzettes” on offer. (Jordan Belfort would probably be unimpressed, but charging both the Brussels-sprout and fried-calamari varieties to the company card must be what passes for hedonism in the financial world these days.)

Three to four plates are recommended per person, tapas style, though they vary in size and composition, and so it’s difficult to get an order exactly right. Grilled beef short ribs, for instance, come piled high, on a sizzling fajitas-style platter with kimchi, but in the migas (the Spanish answer to stir-fry, made with chunks of day-old bread and a bracing pinch of paprika, is having a moment) the bits of trout are scarce. It was an odd decision to chop up the broccoli rabe for a salad, and not the white anchovies served on top. As for the sunchokes with white mushrooms: why serve them cold, so that the only discernible taste was the mushroom vinaigrette? The temperature also seemed off on a cocktail called a lamb shot, made with rosemary-infused vodka, dry vermouth, and—in a twist surely intended for Instagram trolling—lamb consommé. It was gray and cloudy, and like cold soup.

Improbably, ice-cream sundaes for dessert fell short, even the peanut-butter one, which came topped with pretzel crumbs, like a clever college-dining-hall concoction. Telepan Local wants to be a “fun” downtown place, we get that, but fun still needs to be taken seriously. ♦

Open weekdays for lunch and dinner and weekends for brunch and dinner. Small plates $7-$17.